I must go now. Goodbye. The goodbye was for me. It wrote me off. Or it said — so you can put up with this? I mean (looking back on it) he seemed to be teaching me a lesson. I had to choose. Caroline’s way, or his.
And he was gone, we didn’t even answer, and Caroline was looking after him, and shrugging and looking at me and saying, well, really.
I watched him go out, his hands in his pockets. I was red. Caroline was furious, trying to slide out of it. (“He’s always like that, he does it deliberately.”) Sneering at his painting all the way home (“second-rate Paul Nash” — ridiculously unfair). And me feeling so angry with her, and sorry for her at the same time. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t be sorry for her, but I couldn’t tell her he was right.
Between them Caroline and M have every quality I hate in other women. I had a sort of despair for days afterwards, thinking how much of their rotten, pretentious blood I must have in me. Of course, there are times when I like Caroline. Her briskness. Her enthusiasm. Her kindness. And even all the pretentiousness that’s so horrid next to the real thing — well, it’s better than nothing. I used to think the world of her when she came to stay. I used to love staying with her. She backed me up when there was the great family war about my future. All that till I lived with her and saw through her. Grew up. (I’m being a Hard Young Woman.)
Then a week later I ran into the lift at the Tube and he was the only other person there. I said hallo, too brightly. Went red again. He just nodded as if he didn’t want to speak, and then at the bottom (it was vanity, I couldn’t bear to be’lumped with Caroline) I said, I’m sorry my aunt said that at Kenwood.
He said, she always irritates me. I knew he didn’t want to talk about it. As we went towards the platform, I said, she’s frightened of seeming behind the times.
Aren’t you? — and he gave me one of his dry little smiles. I thought, he doesn’t like me playing at “us” against “her.”
We were passing a film poster and he said, that’s a good film. Have you seen it? Do.
When we came out on the platform, he said, come round one day. But leave your bloody aunt at home. And he smiled. A little infectious mischievous smile. Not his age, at all. Then he walked off. So by-himself. So indifferent.
So I did go round. One Saturday morning. He was surprised. I had to sit in silence for twenty minutes with him and the weird Indian music. He got straight back on to the divan and lay with his eyes shut, as if I shouldn’t have come and I felt I ought never to have come (especially without telling C), and I felt as well that it really was a bit much, a pose. I couldn’t relax. At the end he asked me about myself, curtly, as if it was all rather a bore. And I stupidly tried to impress him. Do the one thing I shouldn’t. Show off. I kept on thinking, he didn’t really mean me to come round.
Suddenly he cut me short and took me round the room and made me look at things.
His studio. The most beautiful room. I always feel happy there. Everything in harmony. Everything expressing only him (it’s not deliberate, he hates “interior decoration” and gimmicks and Vogue). But it’s all him. Toinette, with her silly female House and Garden ideas of austere good taste, calling it “cluttered.” I could have bitten her head off. The feeling that someone lives all his life in it, works in it, thinks in it, is it.
And we thawed out. I stopped trying to be clever.
He showed me how he gets his “haze” effect. Tonksing gouache. With all his little home-made tools.
Some friends of his came in, Barber and Frances Cruik-shank. He said, this is Miranda Grey I can’t stand her aunt, all in one breath, and they laughed, they were old friends. I wanted to leave. But they were going for a walk, they had come in to make him go with them, and they wanted me to go too. Barber Cruikshank did; he had special seduction eyes for me.
Supposing aunt sees us, G.P. said. Barber’s got the foulest reputation in Cornwall.
I said, she’s my aunt. Not my duenna.
So we all went to the Vale of Health pub and then on to Kenwood. Frances told me about their life in Cornwall and I felt for the first time in my life that I was among people of an older generation that I understood, real people. And at the same time I couldn’t help seeing Barber was a bit of a sham. All those funny malicious stories. While G.P. was the one who led us into all the serious things. I don’t mean that he wasn’t gay, too. Only he has this strange twist of plunging straight into what matters. Once when he was away getting drinks, Barber asked me how long I’d known G.P. Then he said, I wish to God I’d met someone like G.P. when I was a student. And quiet little Frances said, we think he’s the most wonderful person. He’s one of the few. She didn’t say which few, but I knew what she meant.
At Kenwood G.P. made us split. He took me straight to the Rembrandt and talked about it, without lowering his voice, and I had the smallness to be embarrassed because some other people there stared at us. I thought, we must look like father and daughter. He told me all about the background to the picture, what Rembrandt probably felt like at that time, what he was trying to say, how he said it. As if I knew nothing about art. As if he was trying to get rid of a whole cloud of false ideas I probably had about it.
We went out to wait for the others. He said, that picture moves me very much. And he looked at me, as if he thought I might laugh. One of those flashes of shyness he has.
I said, it moves me now, too.
But he grinned. It can’t possibly. Not for years yet.
How do you know?
He said, I suppose there are people who are purely moved by great art. I never met a painter who was. I’m not. All I think of when I see that picture is that it has the supreme mastery I have spent all my life trying to attain. And shall not. Ever. You’re young. You can understand. But you can’t feel that yet.
I said, I think I do.
He said, then that’s bad. You should be blind to failure. At your age. Then he said, don’t try to be our age. I shall despise you if you do.
He said, you’re like a kid trying to see over a six-foot wall.
That was the first time. He hated me for attracting him. The Professor Higgins side of him.
Later, when the Cruikshanks came out, he said, as they walked towards us, Barber’s a womanizer. Refuse to meet him if he asks.
I gave him a surprised look. He said, smiling at them, not you, I can’t stand the pain for Frances.
Back in Hampstead I left them and went on home. All the way back there I’d realized that G.P. was making sure Barber Cruikshank and I shouldn’t be left alone. They (Barber) asked me to come to see them if I was ever in Cornwall.
G.P. said, see you one day. As if he didn’t care whether he did or not.
I told Caroline I’d met him by chance. He had said he was sorry (lie). If she’d rather I didn’t see him, I wouldn’t. But I found him very stimulating to be with, full of ideas, I needed to meet such people. It was too bad of me, I knew she would do the decent thing if I put it lite that. I was my own mistress — and so on.
And then she said, darling, you know I’m the last person to be a prude, but his reputation… there must be fire, there’s so much smoke.
I said, I’d heard about it. I could look after myself.
It’s her own fault. She shouldn’t insist on being called Caroline and treated like a girl in so many ways. I can’t respect her as an aunt. As a giver of advice.
Everything’s changing. I keep on thinking of him: of things he said and I said, and how we neither of us really understood what the other meant. No, he understood, I think. He counts possibilities so much faster than I can. I’m growing up so quickly down here. Like a mushroom. Or is it that I’ve lost my sense of balance? Perhaps it’s all a dream. I jab myself with the pencil. But perhaps that’s a dream, too.